News from today:
NextGen Fuel Provides Feedstock Advantage to Biodiesel Developers
Qualified NextGen Clients Granted Access to GS CleanTech’s Corn Oil Inventories and Other Extraction Processes
November 13, 2007 - 11:56 AM EST
NextGen Fuel, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of GS AgriFuels Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: GSGF) today announced the expansion of its sales offering to include additional process capabilities and access to low-cost feedstocks that are hedged to the diesel markets.
Given the realities of the biodiesel markets, a successful biodiesel business plan begins with an effective feedstock strategy from which process design flows. NextGen partners with its clients to assist in the development of their business and to structure NextGen’s offering to ensure its clients’ long term success in the young but rapidly evolving renewable fuels industry. NextGen has systematically assembled the resources necessary to facilitate this and to deliver turn-key business solutions.
Backwards Integration
NextGen has the process engineering and operational expertise to design, deploy and commission vegetable oil refining, feedstock treatment and other associated processing equipment necessary to process all known conventional animal fats and vegetable oils in their natively available forms.
These additional process capabilities include vegetable oil refining, pretreatment water washing, feedstock drying, pre-treatment bleaching, post-treatment winterization, methanol distillation, methyl ester distillation, wastewater recirculation and other custom process equipment. Each process is modular and designed to plug-and-play with NextGen’s patent-pending modular transesterification and direct esterification systems.
These additional capabilities are designed to help purchasers of NextGen biodiesel production equipment to craft a feedstock acquisition strategy that will stimulate increased cash flows out of their businesses as compared to conventionally refined vegetable oils. The increased capabilities will allow developers to process crude vegetable oils, choice white grease, yellow grease, and waste oils into fuels that meet and exceed ASTM specifications.
Feedstock Advantage
NextGen’s affiliated process engineering partner, GS CleanTech Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: GSCT) has developed patent-pending technology to extract fats and oils out of co-product and waste streams of targeted agriproducts facilities.
NextGen has partnered with GS CleanTech to provide qualified purchasers of NextGen equipment with the opportunity to purchase extracted fats and crude corn oil at rates that help to increase NextGen client cash flows, increase their ability to service debt, and effectively hedge their cash flows to the biodiesel markets.
-- Crude Corn Oil
GS CleanTech's patent-pending corn oil extraction system is designed to extract crude corn oil out of the distillers dried grain co-product of the dry mill ethanol production process. This crude corn oil has been proven to be an excellent biodiesel feedstock with the proper processing. GS CleanTech currently has more than 50 million gallons of crude corn oil under contract and expects to continue to increase this volume.
GS AgriFuels has designed its own biodiesel production facilities to use NextGen technology and selected additional process capability to cost-effectively convert GS CleanTech's crude corn oil into biodiesel. The timing of the development and onset of operations of GS AgriFuels' biodiesel facilities is such that surplus supplies of corn oil are expected to be available as the associated extraction systems are installed.
Qualified NextGen clients in selected geographies will be granted access to these surplus crude corn oil supplies at an annual rate equal 30% of purchased NextGen biodiesel production capacity for three years at prices that are indexed off of diesel spot and that are set at levels sufficient to service debt and other costs of capital.
-- Fat Extraction From Dissolved Air Flotation Sludge
About 100 million pigs, 35 million cattle, 1.6 billion turkeys and 8 billion chickens are slaughtered and processed each year in the United States. The USDA requires facilities that process these meats to use large volumes of clean water to continuously rinse the meats as they are cut and packaged. These large volumes of water contain extremely high levels of protein and fat that are later removed by using conventional but highly efficient wastewater processing methods. The result of these processes is a cleansed wastewater and a concentrated sludge, which is called Dissolved Air Floatation ("DAF") sludge.
The conventional practice among the more than 500 livestock and poultry processing facilities in the industry is to transport and dispose DAF Sludge through land application. The poultry industry alone produces 2.5 billion pounds or 63,000 tanker loads per year of DAF Sludge. GS CleanTech's DAF Fat Extraction System enables meat and poultry processors to reduce disposal volumes of DAF Sludge by more than 80% by removing fat contained in the DAF Sludge. With proper pretreatment, this fat is a good raw material for the production of biodiesel.
Qualified NextGen clients in selected geographies have the opportunity to purchase turn-key DAF Fat Extraction Systems which are then installed off-site at facilities that GS CleanTech will help place in return for the long term (10 years or more) right to purchase the fat extracted by the system for a price based on a discount to prevailing diesel fuel prices - and at levels that are substantially lower than the price of conventionally available meat fats.
NextGen Fuel’s Technological Capabilities
-- Process Intensified Esterification
Traditional esterification processes typically require several hours to complete the conversion of qualified vegetable oils and animal fats into biodiesel; we intensify and idealize the conditions under which esterification occurs and we are consequently able to complete the conversion in less than 6 minutes instead of hours under true plug (continuous) flow conditions - at a much smaller scale than traditional processes, and at reduced capital and operating costs as compared to traditional processes.
With the NextGen technology, fats and oils simply move through the process with no need to linger at any particular stage while a reaction is allowed to complete; targeted fats and oils are reacted as they pass through the system. This has several compelling implications for developers and operators of biodiesel production facilities:
-- Reduced Equipment and Related Infrastructure Needs - reacting the fats and oils as they move through the system versus at several stops along the away simply reduces the amount of tanks, pumps, controls, pipes, utilities, and square feet of floor space required to produce biodiesel.
-- Process Time - intensifying the chemical reactions involved in biodiesel production accelerates reaction rates. Increased reaction rates correspond to less time required to complete the process, less equipment to manage raw materials as reactions are completed, and overall less labor and other operating and maintenance expenses.
-- Greater Native Feedstock Tolerances - standard biodiesel processing will require feedstocks to comply with a range of relevant material specifications - the chemical reactions involved in a conventional process will not produce the desired product quality if feedstocks are out of specification. Intensifying the relevant chemical reactions increases the tolerance of the process to a wider array of feedstocks and enables more liberal material specification requirements.
These benefits translate to reduced capital and operating expenses and a broader feedstock market for the client and equate to reduced financial, operational and market risk for the client and its stakeholders.
The modular aspect of the NextGen technology allows developers and their financing sources to incur less financial and operating risk as they initiate production at, for example, a 10 or a 20 million gallon per year production facility, and then leverage their cash flows to scale plant sizes up into their desired markets. An additional 10 million gallon system can simply be plugged into an existing plant with reduced balance of plant costs.
Most standard technologies, regardless of size, are designed to process a specific feedstock at any given time. The modular aspect of the NextGen systems allows operators to dedicate process lines to specific feedstocks or blends of feedstocks (for example, the first 10 million gallon line would process fat based feeds while the second processes oil based feeds).
When a standard processing facility needs to be shut-down for maintenance or has a process upset, the operator’s whole business stops. Modularity enables operators to keep their business operating as lines are iteratively shut-down for maintenance or the like. Standardization with a modular process technology also has compelling regulatory permitting and other operating benefits.
NextGen is able to deliver fully designed and engineered, turn-key biodiesel processing systems at a capital and operational cost advantage.
-- Operating NextGen Plants
-- South East Asia: a 5MMgpy system processes crude palm oil with high FFA; this client is developing additional production capacity based on NextGen technology.
-- Adrian, Michigan: this client has a 40MMgpy production facility, 10 MMgpy of which is currently operating. The feedstock is a rendered animal fat and refined vegetable oil. This client has plans to add crude vegetable oil to their feedstock list.
-- Middletown, Indiana: this client has a 25MMgpy production facility, 5 MMgpy of which is currently operating. Another 10MMgpy of capacity is scheduled for commissioning in December 2007 and the balance in February 2008. The feedstock is partially rendered pork lard with high FFA. The client plans to open additional facilities within the region.
-- GS AgriFuels: NextGen's parent company, GS AgriFuels Corporation, is currently developing a 10MMgpy corn oil biodiesel facility co-located at an ethanol plant in Fulton, New York, another at an ethanol plant in Iowa, and a third at another ethanol plant in Indiana. The New York and Iowa plants are being designed to scale up to 20MMgpy and 30MMgpy, respectively, and are scheduled for commissioning in late 2008. All of these facilities are based on NextGen technology.
About GS AgriFuels Corporation
GS AgriFuels was founded to produce and sell clean fuels from agriproducts in innovative ways. GS AgriFuels’ business model is based on the manufacturing and sales of proprietary biodiesel equipment and the use of new technologies to produce biodiesel and ethanol from non-traditional feedstocks such as corn oil and cellulosic biomass through the utilization of several new proprietary technologies, including innovative desiccation, process intensification, gasification, and catalytic technologies, synergistically at small-scales to enable the refining of many forms of biomass into clean fuels at Integrated Multi-Fuel (“IMF”) production facilities.
GS AgriFuels is majority owned by GS CleanTech Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: GSCT). GS CleanTech provides applied engineering and technology transfer services based on clean technologies and process innovations that make it cost-effective and easy to recycle and reuse resources. Additional information on GS CleanTech’s corn oil extraction and other technologies is available online at www.gs-cleantech.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains statements that may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements include statements regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of GreenShift Corporation, GS CleanTech Corporation, GS AgriFuels Corporation, GS Energy Corporation and GS EnviroServices, Inc., and members of their management as well as the assumptions on which such statements are based. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Important factors currently known to management that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-statements include fluctuation of operating results, the ability to compete successfully and the ability to complete before-mentioned transactions. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect changed assumptions, the occurrence of unanticipated events or changes to future operating results.
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